An inspiring and intersectional re-imagining of the path to liberation in Palestine

How is the struggle for Palestinian freedom bound up in other freedom struggles, and how are activists coming together globally to achieve justice and liberation for all?

In this bold book, Palestinian activist Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hyper militarism to incarceration, its environmental devastation, and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine's fate is linked through bonds of solidarity with other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis. She also looks deeper into the interconnectedness of Palestine with Black, migrant, and queer movements, and with other indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, including that of Native Americans.

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts is a powerful and hopeful account, highlighting the role of the Palestinian diaspora, youth, and women, and inspired by activists across the world.

Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021
British Academy Book Prize Finalist
PROSE Award Finalist

Provocative, elegantly written.
--Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books

Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa.
--Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books

In case after case around the globe--from Israel to Sudan--the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the Allies.

Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for all who live within its boundaries.

A deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world...Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination...Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt's Imperialism, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said's Orientalism, this book is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory.
--Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?

A masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting, moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization.
--Karuna Mantena, Columbia University

A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future.
--Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

'Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories...' - Amílcar Cabral

Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories showcases the intellectual foundations and practices underpinning the liberation of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. From the importance of culture in decolonisation, to biting critiques of Portuguese colonialism, and strategies for guerrilla warfare in tropical forests, this new collection brings together select interviews, official speeches and PAIGC party directives from 1962 to 1973. Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories reveals Cabral to be a skilled diplomat and lively and pragmatic thinker, concerned with national liberation in the context of Pan-Africanism and international struggle.

This edition features an exclusive foreword by Grant Farred and introduction by Sónia Vaz Borges, bringing Cabral's contributions sharply into focus for today's bids for freedom.

The Sunday Times Bestseller

A new assessment of the West's colonial record

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.

Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.

These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the 'decolonisation' movement corrodes the West's self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence.

Nigel Biggar tests this indictment, addressing the crucial questions in eight chapters: Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Should we speak of 'colonialism and slavery' in the same breath, as if they were identical? Was the Empire essentially racist? How far was it based on the theft of land? Did it involve genocide? Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation? Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and, Was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

Biggar makes clear that, like any other long-standing state, the British Empire involved elements of injustice, sometimes appalling. On occasions it was culpably incompetent and presided over moments of dreadful tragedy.

Nevertheless, from the early 1800s the Empire was committed to abolishing the slave trade in the name of a Christian conviction of the basic equality of all human beings. It ended endemic inter-tribal warfare, opened local economies to the opportunities of global trade, moderated the impact of inescapable modernisation, established the rule of law and liberal institutions such as a free press, and spent itself in defeating the murderously racist Nazi and Japanese empires in the Second World War.

As encyclopaedic in historical breadth as it is penetrating in analytical depth, Colonialism offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West's future.

A groundbreaking and essential read - illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book

Brilliant thoughts on modern African literature and postcolonial literary criticism from one of the giants of contemporary letters

One of the greatest writers of our time. --Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a towering figure in African literature, and his novels A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood are modern classics. Emerging from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and '60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa, he is now known not just as a novelist--one who, in the late '70s, famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ--but as a major postcolonial theorist.

In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngũgĩ gives us a series of essays that build on the revolutionary ideas about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity that he set out in his earlier work. In a book that is intricate, nuanced, and accessible, he reaffirms the power of African languages to fight back against both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas also explores these themes through chapters on some of Ngũgĩ's contemporaries, including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

A book with immense relevance to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas works both as a wonderful introduction to the enduring themes of Ngũgĩ's work as well as a vital addition to the library of the world's greatest and most provocative living writers.

Behold the
sleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.

The idealized
Western museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British
Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for over
a century: a uniquely rarified public space of cool stone, providing an
experience of leisure and education for the general public while carefully
tending fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representation
and ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed their
interest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both their
adaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing and culturally
rich society.

With Decolonize
Museums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the essentially
colonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans' atrocities were
reimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for the
occupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues,
remain integral to the authority exercised by museums today. Citing pop culture
references from Indiana Jones to Black Panther,
and highlighting crucial activist campaigns and legal action to redress the
harms perpetrated by museums and their proxies, Decolonize Museums argues
that we must face a dismantling of these seemingly eternal edifices, and
consider what, if anything, might take their place.

Patriots, Traitors and Empires is an account of modern Korean history, written from the point of view of those who fought to free their country from the domination of foreign empires. It traces the history of Korea's struggle for freedom from opposition to Japanese colonialism starting in 1905 to North Korea's current efforts to deter the threat of invasion by the United States or anybody else by having nuclear weapons. Koreans have been fighting a civil war since 1932, when Kim Il Sung, founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, along with other Korean patriots, launched a guerrilla war against Japanese colonial domination. Other Koreans, traitors to the cause of Korea's freedom, including a future South Korean president, joined the side of Japan's Empire, becoming officers in the Japanese army or enlisting in the hated colonial police force. From early in the 20th century when Japan incorporated Korea into its burgeoning empire, Koreans have struggled against foreign domination, first by Japan then by the United States. Patriots, Traitors and Empires, The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom is a much-needed antidote to the jingoist clamor spewing from all quarters whenever Korea is discussed.

Millions of Africans, Asians, and other peoples were the subjects of colonial rule by overseas empires through the mid-twentieth century. By the end of the century, however, nearly all of these peoples had become citizens of independent nation-states. The United Nations grew from 51 member states at its founding in 1945 to 193 today. Its nearly four-fold increase is one measure of the historic shift in international relations that has occurred over the past half-century. Decolonization is the term commonly used to refer to this transition from a world of colonial empires to a world of nation-states in the years after World War II.

Both ex-imperial states and post-colonial regimes have promoted a selective and sanitized version of decolonization that casts their own conduct in a positive light, characterizing the process as negotiated and the outcome as inevitable. This book draws on recent scholarship to challenge that view, demonstrating that considerable violence and instability accompanied the end of empire and that the outcome was often up for grabs.

This book highlights three themes. The first is that global war between empires precipitated decolonization, creating the economic and political crises that gave colonial subjects the opportunity to seek independence. The second theme is that nation-state was not the only option pursued by anti-colonial activists. Many of them sought pan- and trans-national polities instead, but a combination of international and institutional pressures made the nation-state the standard template. The third theme is that the struggle to escape imperial subjugation and create nation-states generated widespread violence and produced huge refugee populations, leading to political problems that persist to the present day. By focusing on these crucial points, Dane Kennedy reminds us how the tumultuous, even tragic, changes caused by the decolonization profoundly shaped the world we live in.

An extremely convincing and persuasive argument that the only conceivable future for justice and peace necessitates a process of decolonization and equal rights for all.--Electronic Intifada

For decades we have spoken of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but what if our understanding of the issue has been wrong all along? Here is a detailed explanation of how the concept of settler colonialism provides a clearer understanding of the Zionist movement's project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, displacing the Palestinian Arab population and marginalizing its cultural presence.

Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and author of An Israeli in Palestine, argues that the only way out of a colonial situation is decolonization: the dismantling of Zionist structures of domination and control and their replacement by a single democratic state, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews forge a new civil society and a shared political community. To show how this can be done, Halper uses the 10-point program of the One Democratic State Campaign as a guide for thinking through the process of decolonization to its post-colonial conclusion. Topics include:

*How Does Zionist Settler Colonialism Work?
*The Three Cycles of Zionist Expansion
*Hasbara: The Management of Legitimacy
*A Plan of Decolonization
*Inching Toward Decolonization
*Forms of Palestinian Resistance and Agency
*Strategy: how Do We Get There?
*And much more!

Halper's unflinching reframing will empower activists fighting for the rights of the Palestinians and democracy for all. He says, But this is not a book about settler colonialism or Zionism per se. It is a book about summoning power and decolonization, about dismantling a settler regime and replacing it with something more equitable.

For radical twentieth-century feminists, it was a rallying cry for bodily autonomy and political power. For influencers and lifestyle brands, it's buying fancy nutrition and body products at a premium. And it has now infiltrated nearly every food, leisure, and pop-culture space as a multi-billion-dollar industry.
What is it? To quote a million memes: it's called self-care.

In Decolonize Self-Care Alyson K. Spurgas and Zoë C. Meleo-Erwin deliver a comprehensive sociological analysis and scathing critique of the catchphrase's capitalist, racist undertones. To decolonize self-care, they argue, requires a full reckoning with the exclusionary, appropriative nature of most of the wellness industry, but this education is only the first step in the process. We must commit to new models of care and well-being that allow for health, pleasure, and community--for everyone.

We live in a moment rife with mixed emotions-existential anxieties about catastrophic climate change, presumptuous confidence in planet-hacking geoengineering technologies, and hopefulness of youth climate activism. Decolonizing Environmentalism helps us navigate these emotions and reimagine our approach to environmental stewardship.

The authors cast a critical eye on wealthy and influential environmental groups that committed to anti-racist strategies in the wake of the racial awakening of 2020. Yet, they continue to embrace false solutions like carbon markets and biodiversity offsets, which carry deeply racialized consequences. By tracing the roots of these misplaced priorities to detrimental modernity steeped in colonialism and capitalism, the authors call for transformational changes in human-nature relationships. They distil lessons from the divestment movement, which has questioned the fossil fuel industry's moral standing, and food sovereignty activists, who have mobilized global civil society to hold agribusiness corporations accountable.

Amidst calls for apocalyptic optimism, Kashwan and Hasnain offer a radical vision grounded in intersectional ecofeminism, Indigenous sovereignty, and strategies honed in the trenches of transnational environmentalism. In these extraordinary times, Decolonizing Environmentalism invites readers to embark on a transformative journey to embrace anti-racist, emancipatory, and regenerative approaches to environmentalism.

This edited volume focuses on experiences with Indigenous resurgence in everyday settings - those often unseen, unacknowledged actions that promote community health and well-being. The twenty-two contributors to this book highlight how everyday actions can be important emancipatory sites for understanding the relational, experiential and dynamic dimensions of Indigenous resurgence. Overall, these daily acts of resurgence, at the community, family and personal levels, can be critical for deepening the ways we think about resistance, education, and transformative change.

For Land and Culture offers the first comprehensive account of a long forgotten and neglected grassroots movement. In the wake of Iran's 1979 revolution, Turkmen peasants collectively occupied their ancestral lands, which had been seized through colonial modernization, land registry and land reform under the Pahlavi monarchy. The book chronicles this movement using theoretical and historical engagement with the modern councils and offers a detailed account of the land question in Iran's colonial modernization. The book describes the systematic dispossession of Turkmen communities from some of the most fertile areas in Iran. Vahabzadeh shows how Turkmen land occupation in 1979 led to a sophisticated council system that offered a practical politics of semi-autonomous, democratic self-governance in the face of hostile militias and other forces of the nascent authoritarian Islamic Republic. With social justice as one of its unshakable pillars, the Turkmen council movement took back land as commons and abolished capitalist private ownership of land, providing an alternative to top-down politics until it was defeated by the state through a combination of military terror and assimilation. Although short lived, the radically democratic movement connected with global struggles of Indigenous Peoples and autonomous movements who had broken away from patriarchal state forms and capitalist domination.

Edward W. Said discusses the centrality of popular resistance to his understanding of culture, history, and social change. He reveals his thoughts on the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lays out a compelling vision for a secular, democratic future in the Middle East--and globally.

Edward W. Said's books include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism, and The Politics of Dispossession. He has also published a memoir, Out of Place.

David Barsamian is the producer of the critically acclaimed program Alternative Radio.

Achille Mbembe is one of the world's most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity.

In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France's failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory's historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.

For those interested in continuing the struggle for decolonization, the word multiculturalism can seem like a sad joke. After all, institutionalized multiculturalism today is a muck of buzzwords, branding strategies, and virtue signaling that has nothing to do with real struggles against racism and colonialism. But Decolonize Multiculturalism unearths a buried history.

The book focuses on the student and youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by global movements for decolonization and anti-racism, which aimed to fundamentally transform their society, as well as the fierce repression of these movements by the state, corporations, and university administrations. Part of the response has been sheer violence--campus policing, for example, only began in the '70s, paving the way for the militarized campuses of today--with institutionalized multiculturalism acting like the velvet glove around the iron fist of state violence.

And yet today's multiculturalism also contains residues of the original radical demands of the student and youth movements that it aims to repress: to open up the university, to wrench it from its settler colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal capitalist origins, and to transform it into a place of radical democratic possibility.

Epochs ago, a tribe prophesized that foreigners would plunder and dominate their land. The prophecy also warned that if the foreign aggressors did not atone for their sins of cruelty, theft, and murder, they would suffer from great fire and destruction. After five centuries of brutal occupation, a relentless virus with mysterious origins challenges the rulers. Will the repercussions of the invisible invader force the occupiers to make amends for their atrocities, or will the rulers be forced to suffer the prophesized conflagration?

In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality's how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its universals of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.